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I just binge-listened to the six episodes of the first season of this podcast from Stephen Fry—it’s excellent!

It covers the history of communication from the emergence of language to the modern day. At first I was worried that it was going to rehash some of the more questionable ideas in the risible Sapiens, but it turned out to be far more like James Gleick’s The Information or Tom Standage’s The Victorian Internet (two of my favourite books on the history of technology).

There’s no annoying sponsorship interruptions and the whole series feels more like an audiobook than a podcast—an audiobook researched, written and read by Stephen Fry!

The tools that characterize a person’s time and place in technological history are the ones that a person actually uses, the technologies relied upon so heavily that they can feel like an extension of oneself. This is part of how technology can define a culture, and why sometimes you forget the thing you’re using is technology at all. Until, eventually, inevitably, the technology is all but forgotten.

The hits keep on comin’ from Clearleft. This time, it’s Danielle with an absolutely brilliant and thoughtful piece on the perils of gaps and overlaps in pattern libraries, design systems and organisations.

This is such a revealing lens to view these things through! Once you’re introduced to it, it’s hard to “un-see” problems in terms of gaps and overlaps in categorisation. And even once the problems are visible, you still need to solve them in the right way:

Recognising the gaps and overlaps is only half the battle. If we apply tools to a people problem, we will only end up moving the problem somewhere else.

Some issues can be solved with better tools or better processes. In most of our workplaces, we tend to reach for tools and processes by default, because they feel easier to implement. But as often as not, it’s not a technology problem. It’s a people problem. And the solution actually involves communication skills, or effective dialogue.

The writing system – originally named World Writing in 1942, then Semantography in 1947, and finally Blissymoblics in the 1960s – contains several hundred basic geometric symbols (“Bliss-characters”) that can be combined in different ways to represent more complex concepts (“Bliss-words”). For example, the Bliss-characters for “house” and “medical” are combined to form the Bliss-word for “hospital” or “clinic”. The modular structure invites comparison to the German language; the German word for “hospital ” – “krankenhaus” – translates directly to “sick house”.

This is a great piece by Alla, ostensibly about Bulb’s design principles, but it’s really about what makes for effective design principles in general. It’s packed full of great advice, like these design principles for design principles:

A terrific piece by Hidde, about CSS grid, but also about a much bigger question:

I don’t think we owe it to any users to make it all exactly the same. Therefore we can get away with keeping fallbacks very simple. My hypothesis: users don’t mind, they’ve come for the content.

If users don’t mind, that leaves us with team members, bosses and clients. In my ideal world we should convince each other, and with that I mean visual designers, product owners, brand people, developers, that it is ok for our lay-out not to look the same everywhere. Because serving good-looking content everywhere is more important than same grids everywhere.

The remote-access computer transponder called the “joymaker” is your most valuable single possession in your new life. If you can imagine a combination of telephone, credit card, alarm clock, pocket bar, reference library, and full-time secretary, you will have sketched some of the functions provided by your joymaker.

Essentially, it is a transponder connecting you with the central computing facilities of the city in which you reside on a shared-time, self-programming basis.

A forthcoming documentary about the company spun out of Apple to create a handheld communication device …in 1990.

From mobile computing, social media, downloadable apps and e-commerce to touchscreens, emoji and USB, the products and services that now dominate the tech industry and our day-to-day lives were born at General Magic.

This is a great description by Chris of the problems that webmentions aim to solve.

If you use Twitter, your friend Alice only uses Facebook, your friend Bob only uses his blog on WordPress, and your pal Chuck is over on Medium, it’s impossible for any one of you to @mention another. You’re all on different and competing platforms, none of which interoperate to send these mentions or notifications of them. The only way to communicate in this way is if you all join the same social media platforms, resulting in the average person being signed up to multiple services just to stay in touch with all their friends and acquaintances.

Given the issues of privacy and identity protection, different use cases, the burden of additional usernames and passwords, and the time involved, many people don’t want to do this. Possibly worst of all, your personal identity on the internet can end up fragmented like a Horcrux across multiple websites over which you have little, if any, control.

Susan writes about the challenges when trying to get widespread adoption of a design system. Spoiler: the challenges aren’t technical.

Change is hard. Communication and collaboration are absolutely necessary to make a system work. And the more people you can get involved from various disciplines the better chance you have of maintaining your system.

Whenever someone asks me to do something that I think seems ill-conceived in some way, I ask them to write it down. That’s it. Because writing is high effort. Making sentences is the easy bit, it’s the thinking I want them to do. By considering their request it slows them down. Maybe 30% of the time or something, they come back and say ‘oh, that thing I asked you to do, I’ve had a think and it’s fine, we don’t need to do it’.

Like Mark, I think I enjoy being on the receiving end of this too:

These days, I welcome being asked to ‘write it down’. It gives me permission to take a breath. To pause and reflect on what I’m asking. I’m convinced my heart rate drops a little. You see, in some environments this would be called ‘process’, or ‘red tape’. ‘Being asked to write something down is a blocker to my flow’. Those kinds of responses miss the mark. When being asked to ‘write something down’ it’s really shorthand for ‘take some time and think about what you’re asking’.

I recently received this very instruction about speaking at an upcoming event. I honestly don’t know how I could talk about universality, progressive enhancement, and user experience without it being political. So I interpreted the request to be about partisanship rather than politics:

Sometimes when people hear the term “political,” they understand it as “partisan.” To be political is to acknowledge the lived experiences of people outside of yourself. To be partisan is to advocate for the beliefs or propaganda of a specific party affiliation.

This is the rarely-seen hour-long version of my Resilience talk. It’s the director’s cut, if you will, featuring an Arthur C. Clarke sub-plot that goes from the telegraph to the World Wide Web to the space elevator.

We need to keep our eyes on the prize: making sure the internet does not suck for as many people as possible for as long as possible. That’s the work we need to be doing. And we should do it not from a place of fear or despair, but from a place of joy.